Chile-born Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo uses an even mix of digitally crafted marks and hand-made surfaces to create his illustrations and portraiture work. His vividly colourful faces range from the realistic to eerie and sometimes comical.
We like the addition of the watercolour textures and more roughly worked-out areas, it’s a nice little twist to add to the vector shapes. However, it’s probably the dead expressions and creepy, vacant eyes that will draw you in and keep you captivated in some of his more abstract pieces. He tells us a little more about how his process works.
I am mainly focused on illustration with mixed media, traditional techniques and digital processing.
Regarding the process, I usually start from a photograph, print or digital image, which I draw on vector graphics software. This process is rather mechanical but, while I am doing it, I am thinking about the further development of the piece.
Sometimes, I follow the lines in the original and sometimes I distort or geometrize some aspects of the image. This is the frame or skeleton of my work. In the second part, I add textures to the piece. I mainly use watercolor on paper as textures, which I do myself and later scan and add as layers in Photoshop until I reach the final result.
© Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo, 2012
